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Datadog vs Grafana Cloud: pricing, quotas & features (2025)

Enterprise cloud monitoring — infra, APM, logs, RUM, security, LLM
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated May 2026

Datadog website ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Summary

Datadog and Grafana Cloud are both monitoring platforms, addressing the same core use case with different implementation philosophies and trade-offs. Both offer a free tier, making it easy to prototype without a credit card. Datadog's paid plans start at $15/month, lower than Grafana Cloud's entry point at $19/month. Datadog has a broader documented feature set (19 vs 16 features). Budget-sensitive teams will find Datadog easier to justify early on. All pricing and quota data below is sourced from Datadog and Grafana Cloud's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.

Datadog vs Grafana Cloud: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2025)

En esta comparativa analizamos Datadog y Grafana Cloud lado a lado — incluyendo precios mensuales, límites del tier gratuito, características técnicas, cuotas de uso (almacenamiento, transferencia, usuarios activos mensuales) y los interfaces de desarrollo disponibles. Todos los datos proceden de la documentación oficial de cada proveedor, no de respuestas generadas por IA.

Datadog es una plataforma de la categoría monitoring — Enterprise cloud monitoring — infra, APM, logs, RUM, security, LLM. Ofrece 11 tiers de precio: Serverless Monitoring gratuito, Free gratuito, Logs Ingestion gratuito, Logs Standard Index gratuito. Su catálogo en Staxly documenta 19 características y 12 interfazes para desarrolladores.

Grafana Cloud pertenece a la categoría monitoring — Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana. Ofrece 4 tiers de precio: Free gratuito, Self-Hosted (OSS) gratuito, Pro desde $19/mes, Enterprise desde $25000/mes. Su catálogo documenta 16 características y 7 interfazes para desarrolladores.

A continuación encontrarás los tiers de precio completos de ambas plataformas, una matriz de cuotas del tier gratuito (transferencia, almacenamiento, MAU, llamadas a la API y otros límites), el listado completo de características y los interfaces (CLI, SDKs, REST, GraphQL, MCP) disponibles para integrar cada servicio.

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Pricing tiers

Datadog

Serverless Monitoring
$0.13 per month per 1M invocations.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
Up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention. Community edition of Agent.
Free
Logs Ingestion
$0.10 per ingested/scanned GB per month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Logs Standard Index
$1.70 per million log events/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Logs Flex Storage
$0.05 per million events stored/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Infra Pro
Per host per month (annual billing). 15-month metric retention, 500+ integrations.
$15/mo
Infra Enterprise
Per host. Advanced features, Network Flow Monitoring.
$23/mo
APM
Per host (with Infra attached). Distributed tracing.
$31/mo
APM Pro
Per host. Continuous Profiler + Data Streams Monitoring.
$35/mo
APM Enterprise
Per host. App & API Protection + more.
$40/mo
Enterprise
Volume discounts, dedicated CSM, regional data residency.
Custom
Datadog website ↗

Grafana Cloud

Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Grafana Cloud website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Datadog vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricDatadogGrafana Cloud
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Datadog · 19 features

  • APM — Distributed tracing + service catalog + code hotspots.
  • Application Security — Runtime attack detection, threat intelligence, IAST.
  • CI Visibility — Test + pipeline performance analytics.
  • Cloud SIEM — Security events correlation, detection rules, audit trails.
  • Continuous Profiler — Always-on CPU, memory, lock profiling in production.
  • Dashboards — Pre-built + custom dashboards.
  • Database Monitoring — Slow query detection for Postgres, MySQL, Mongo, Oracle, SQL Server.
  • Incident Management — Built-in incident response with postmortems.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring — Host, container, k8s metrics. 700+ integrations. Live process + container maps.
  • LLM Observability — OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. trace + cost + prompt eval.
  • Log Management — Ingest any logs, structured or raw. Pipelines, parsing, archives to S3.
  • Monitors — Anomaly, forecast, outlier, composite monitors.
  • Network Performance Monitoring — Packet-level analysis, flow monitoring.
  • Notebooks — Runbook-style dashboards with queries + docs.
  • Real User Monitoring — Frontend performance, JS errors, user sessions, Core Web Vitals.
  • Serverless Monitoring — AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions observability.
  • Service Catalog — Service inventory with ownership + documentation.
  • Synthetics — Synthetic HTTP + browser tests, API tests, mobile tests.
  • Workflow Automation — No-code workflows triggered by events.

Grafana Cloud · 16 features

  • Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
  • Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
  • Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
  • Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
  • Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
  • Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
  • Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
  • Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
  • Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
  • Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
  • Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
  • Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
  • Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
  • Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
  • Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
  • k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.

Developer interfaces

KindDatadogGrafana Cloud
CLIDatadog AgentGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDKdd-trace (Node), dd-trace-dotnet, dd-trace-go, dd-trace-java, dd-trace-js (RUM), ddtrace (Python), ddtrace (Ruby)Faro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTDatadog REST APIGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
MCPDatadog MCP—
OTHEROpenTelemetry (OTLP), WebhooksPrometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP

Key takeaways

  • Both Datadog and Grafana Cloud offer a free tier — Datadog ("Serverless Monitoring") and Grafana Cloud ("Free") — with no credit card required to start.
  • The entry-level paid plan is $15/month for Datadog (Infra Pro) vs. $19/month for Grafana Cloud (Pro).
  • Datadog has a broader documented feature set (19 features) vs. Grafana Cloud (16 features) in Staxly's catalog.
  • Developer integrations differ: only Datadog offers MCP.
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Datadog and Grafana Cloud may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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